Briefing Paper September 2006

22nd September 2006 5:46 pm

Palestine’s War of Independence

We will make all life impossible in South Lebanon

Moshe Dayan Le Monde 14/4/74

As one who knows that all the Hamas activists deported by Yitzhak Rabin returned to leadership and command positions in the organisation, Olmert should know that arresting leaders only strengthens them and their supporters. But this is not merely faulty reasoning; arresting people to use as bargaining chips is the act of a gang, not of a state.

Israel’s offensive against peace: War crimes

Alain Gresh Le Monde Diplomatique June 2006

The 1949 Geneva Conventions state, in article 54 of their additional protocol: “Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited”. It is also “prohibited to attack, destroy, remove or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population”. That means that the Israeli army’s latest offensive in the occupied territories amounts to war crimes; it includes the blockade of the civilian population and their collective punishment, the bombing of Gaza’s $150m power station, depriving 750,000 Palestinians of electricity in the intense summer heat, and the kidnapping on the West Bank of 64 members of the political wing of Hamas, including eight cabinet ministers and 22 members of the Palestinian Legislative Council. On 5 July the Israeli government said it would expand its military operation in Gaza.

Israel has violated another principle of international law in this offensive: proportionality. Article 51 of the protocol forbids “an attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.” Can saving one soldier’s life justify destruction on this scale?

The Israeli government has negotiated prisoner exchanges several times: in 1985 Israel freed 1,150 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for three of its soldiers captured by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC). Negotiations are more likely to obtain the release of Gilad Shalit than military attacks which, on the contrary, risk bringing about his death. Israel know this: Israel Defence Forces Chief of Staff Dan Halutz has told the cabinet that military action alone will not secure the release of Shalit (Haaretz, 3 July 2006).

An editorial in Haaretz on 30 June 2006 said: “Bombing bridges that can be circumvented both by car and on foot; seizing an airport that has been in ruins for years; destroying a power station, plunging large parts of the Gaza Strip into darkness; distributing flyers suggesting that people be concerned about their fate; a menacing flight over Bashar Assad’s palace; and arresting elected Hamas officials: The government wishes to convince us that all these actions are intended only to release the soldier Gilad Shalit.” The editorial concludes: “As one who knows that all the Hamas activists deported by Yitzhak Rabin returned to leadership and command positions in the organisation, Olmert should know that arresting leaders only strengthens them and their supporters. But this is not merely faulty reasoning; arresting people to use as bargaining chips is the act of a gang, not of a state.”

In reality, as the Israeli media has revealed, this offensive was planned a long time ago; that includes the arrest of leading Hamas officials, starting with ministers and legislators. The purpose was not just to get rid the Hamas government elected in January but all form of Palestinian authority. That was the thinking behind the disengagement plan devised by Ariel Sharon, then Israel’s prime minister, and continued by his successor, Ehud Olmert: in order to draw Israel’s borders unilaterally it was necessary to tell the world that there was no Palestinian interlocutor.

This strategy started well before Hamas’ electoral victory: throughout 2005, when Mahmoud Abbas was governing the Palestinian Authority (PA) with a Fatah majority, Sharon systematically refused to negotiate with him and went ahead with the construction of the separation wall – flouting the ruling of the International Court of Justice. His policy of unilateralism flew in the face of the core achievement of the Oslo accords. This was the conviction that the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict lies in bilateral negotiation between the Palestine Liberation Organistion (PLO) and Israel; the agreement signed on 9 September 1993 by Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat confirmed that belief, affirming mutual recognition between Israel and the PLO.

The Hamas victory in the January elections made it easy for the Israeli government to hot up its propaganda war on the familiar “there is no Palestinian interlocutor” theme. The United States and the European Union put three conditions on the new Palestinian government: to recognise Israel, stop all armed attacks and accept the agreements reached between previous Palestinian governments and Israel. They then suspended their direct aid, greatly increasing the sufferings of the Palestinian population who had foolishly voted the wrong way. They show limitless tolerance towards the Israeli government, which refuses to recognise the right of the Palestinians to an independent state on the territories occupied in 1967, uses state terrorism against civilians and failed to fulfil its undertakings under the Oslo accords. Benita Ferrero-Waldner, European commissioner for foreign affairs, even hailed the Israeli government’s unilateral policy as a brave decision.

It is surely no coincidence that the present offensive came just as all the Palestinian movements (except for Islamic Jihad) signed a joint declaration – The Prisoners’ National Conciliation Document, Palestine Centre, 28 June 2006 – accepting the establishment of a Palestinian state on all the territories occupied in 1967, with East Jerusalem as its capital – an implicit recognition of Israel. The Israeli government wanted to stamp out any new Palestinian opening towards peace. It had done the same in 2002, when an Arab summit in Beirut endorsed a plan that proposed recognition of Israel in exchange for the creation of a Palestinian state; the Sharon government responded, on the pretext of a suicide attack, with a generalised offensive against the occupied territories.

But Operation Summer Rain, the poetic name of the present Israeli offensive, shows the failure of its unilateral policy. The withdrawal of the Israeli army from the West Bank and Gaza without negotiations with the Palestinians cannot lead to peace. And in the West Bank, where Israeli settlements and Palestinian population are inextricably linked, any unilateral evacuation can only lead to further violence.

Some of this has to do with the paradox of power: the stronger the Israeli army becomes, the more susceptible and vulnerable it becomes to even a minor setback

What is at issue here is not democracy but the right to resist Israeli arrogance and be treated on a par with it in every respect, including the use of force. If Israel has the right to “defend itself” then so has everyone else.

If Israel has the right to use force in self-defence, so do its neighbours

Ahmad Samih Khalidi The Guardian 18/07/06

Contrary to what Blair seems to believe, the use of force is unlikely to breed western style-liberalism and moderation. What is at issue here is not democracy but the right to resist Israeli arrogance and be treated on a par with it in every respect, including the use of force. If Israel has the right to “defend itself” then so has everyone else.

Much has been made in recent days – at the G8 summit and elsewhere – of Israel’s right to retaliate against the capture of its soldiers, or attacks on its troops on its own sovereign territory. Some, such as those in the US administration, seem to believe that Israel has an unqualified licence to hit back at its enemies no matter what the cost. And even those willing to recognise that there may be a problem tend to couch it in terms of Israel’s “disproportionate use of force” rather than its basic right to take military action.

But what is at stake here is not proportionality or the issue of self-defence, but symmetry and equivalence. Israel is staking a claim to the exclusive use of force as an instrument of policy and punishment, and is seeking to deny any opposing state or non-state actor a similar right. It is also largely succeeding in portraying its own “right to self-defence” as beyond question, while denying anyone else the same. And the international community is effectively endorsing Israel’s stance on both counts.

From an Arab point of view this cannot be right. There is no reason in the world why Israel should be able to enter Arab sovereign soil to occupy, destroy, kidnap and eliminate its perceived foes – repeatedly, with impunity and without restraint – while the Arab side cannot do the same. And if the Arab states are unable or unwilling to do so then the job should fall to those who can.

It is important to bear in mind that in both the case of the Hamas raid that led to the invasion of Gaza and the Hizbullah attack that led to the assault on Lebanon it was Israel’s regular armed forces, not its civilians, that were targeted. It is hard to see how this can be filed under the rubric of “terrorism”, rather than a straightforward tactical defeat for Israel’s much-vaunted military machine; one that Israel seems loth to acknowledge.

Some of this has to do with the paradox of power: the stronger the Israeli army becomes, the more susceptible and vulnerable it becomes to even a minor setback. The loss of even one tank, the capture of one soldier or damage done to one warship has a negative-multiplier effect: Israel’s “deterrent” power is dented out of all proportion to the act itself. Israel’s retaliation is thus partly a matter of restoring its deterrence, partly sheer vengeance, and partly an attempt to compel its adversaries to do its bidding.

But there is also something else at work: Israel’s fear of acknowledging any form of equivalence between the two sides. And it is precisely this that seems to provide the moral and psychological underpinning for Israel’s ongoing assault in both Gaza and Lebanon – the sense that it may have met its match in audacity, tactical ingenuity and “clean” military action from an adversary who may even have learned a thing or two from Israel itself, and may be capable of learning even more in the future.

There has of course been nothing “clean” about Israeli military action throughout the many decades of conflict in Palestine and Lebanon. Israel’s wanton disregard for civilian life during the past few days is neither new nor out of character. For those complaining about violations of Israeli sovereignty by Hizbullah or Hamas, it may be useful to recall the tens of thousands of Israeli violations of Lebanese sovereignty since the late 60s, the massive air raids of the mid-70s and early 80s, the 1978 and 1982 invasions and occupation of the capital Beirut, the hundreds of thousands of refugees, the 28-year-old buffer zone and proxy force set up in southern Lebanon, the assassinations, car bombs, and massacres, and finally the continuing violations of Lebanese soil, airspace and territorial waters and the detention of Lebanese prisoners even after Israel’s withdrawal in 2000.

It is unnecessary here to recount the full range of Israel’s violations of Palestinian “sovereignty”, not least of which is its recent refusal to accept the sovereign electoral choice of the Palestinian people. Israel’s extraterritorial, extrajudicial execution of Palestinian leaders and activists began in the early 70s and has not ceased since. But for those seeking further enlightenment about Hamas’s recent action, the fact is that some 650,000 acts of imprisonment have taken place since the occupation began in 1967, and that 9,000 Palestinians are currently in Israel’s jails, including some 50 old-timers incarcerated before and despite the 1993 Oslo accords, and many others whom Israel refuses to release on the grounds that they have “blood on their hands”, as if only one side in this conflict was culpable, or the value of one kind of human blood was superior to another.

If there ever was a case for establishing some form of mutually acknowledged parity regarding the ground rules of the conflict, Hamas and Hizbullah have a good one to make. And if there ever was a case for demonstrating that what is good on one side of the border should also good on the other, Hamas and Hizbullah’s logic has strong appeal to Arab and Muslim public opinion – regardless of what the supine Arab state system may say.

Indeed, as George Bush and other western leaders splutter on about freedom, democracy, and Israel’s right to defend itself, Tony Blair’s repeated claim that events in the region should not be linked to terrible events elsewhere is looking increasingly fatuous. The slowly expanding war in Afghanistan, the devastation of Iraq, the death and destruction in Gaza and the bombing of Beirut are all providing a slow but sure drip feed for those who believe that the west is incapable of taking a balanced moral stance, and is directly or indirectly complicit in a design meant to break Arab and Muslim will and subjugate it to untrammelled Israeli force.

Contrary to what Blair seems to believe, the use of force is unlikely to breed western style-liberalism and moderation. What is at issue here is not democracy but the right to resist Israeli arrogance and be treated on a par with it in every respect, including the use of force. If Israel has the right to “defend itself” then so has everyone else.

Furthermore, there is nothing in the history of the region to suggest that Israel’s destruction of mass popular movements such as Hamas or Hizbullah (even if this were possible) would drive their successors closer to western-style democracy, and every reason to believe the opposite. Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 did away with the PLO and produced Hizbullah instead, the incarceration and elimination of Arafat only served to strengthen Hamas, and the wars in Afghanistan, the Gulf and Iraq gave birth to Bin Ladenist terrorism and extended its reach and appeal. And we should not be surprised if the summer of 2006 produces more of the same.

Howeve,r Israel’s latest adventure ends, it will not produce greater sympathy and understanding between west and east, or a downturn in extremism. Indeed the most likely outcome is that a new wave of virulent and possibly unconventional anti-western terrorism may well crash against this and other shores. We will all – Israelis, Arabs and westerners – suffer as a result. [

Ahmad Samih Khalidi is a senior associate member of St Antony’s College, Oxford, a former Palestinian negotiator and the co-author, with Hussein Agha, of A Framework for a Palestinian National Security Doctrine (Chatham House, 2006)]

What is new – and dramatically so – about this campaign is its outcome. Arabs soon dubbed this the sixth ArabIsraeli war, and for some of them – and indeed for some Israelis – it already ranks, in its strategic, psychological and political consequences, as perhaps the most significant since Israel’s “war of independence” in 1948. For a state that relies for its survival not on the acceptance of its neighbours but on its repeatedly demonstrated ability to defeat and intimidate them by superior force of arms, it is vital to retain what it calls its “deterrent power”. What, on July 12, made Hizbullah’s seizure of two soldiers so unbearable was not that it was a “terrorist” act; it was that – allowed to pass without an appropriate response – it would have constituted a grievous blow to that “deterrent power”. But with the extraordinary shortcomings of that response it has not only failed to repair its deterrent power, it has undermined it as never before. The Guardian August 17, 2006

Hizbullah has achieved what Arab states only dreamed of

David Hirst

There was nothing new about the broad objective behind Israel’s war on Lebanon: through the destruction of Hizbullah it was to wreak fundamental change in a strategic, political and military environment that it had come to regard as menacing to its future. Nothing new about its methods either: the use of massive violence not merely against its military adversary but against the civilians and the infrastructure of the country in which it operates. Or about its official justification: seizing upon one single act of “terrorist” violence from the other side as the opportunity to strike at the whole “terrorist” organisation that was responsible for it. Or about the international support, even outright collaboration, it enjoyed, although in the case of the US and Britain this support was unprecedented in its partisan degree and in the perception of the vast dimensions, nature and menace of the “enemy” against which Israel was waging war. For Condoleezza Rice the “root causes” of the Lebanese crisis lay not on the Israeli side but in the wider Arab and Muslim world: Hizbullah was but the cutting edge of “global terror”, of the Islamic fanaticism that nurtured it, and of those states, Iran and Syria, that succour these forces for their own purposes, whether inspired by ideology or realpolitik.

Nor was there anything fundamentally unexpected about the Israeli campaign. For it grew out of very nature and dynamics of the Arab-Israeli conflict. For all the peace-seeking diplomacy it also engenders, that conflict remains what it was from the outset, one in which violence is always the ultimate arbiter. Ever since the 70s, when the Arab states lost the will and ability to fight classical wars, most of the violence has been confined to the main protagonists – Israelis and Palestinians. Basically, Israel seeks through violence to preserve all the gains, at Palestinian expense, that violence secured it in the first place, or at least as much of them as is consistent with its view of what would constitute a reasonable peaceful settlement. The Palestinians use violence in repeated attempts to wrest back enough of what they have lost, or simply to cause sufficient pain and alarm to make possible what, in their view, that settlement should entail. Most of the time violence has been low-level and attritional, but every now and then it escalates into something much larger.

What is new – and dramatically so – about this campaign is its outcome. Arabs soon dubbed this the sixth Arab-Israeli war, and for some of them – and indeed for some Israelis – it already ranks, in its strategic, psychological and political consequences, as perhaps the most significant since Israel’s “war of independence” in 1948. For a state that relies for its survival not on the acceptance of its neighbours but on its repeatedly demonstrated ability to defeat and intimidate them by superior force of arms, it is vital to retain what it calls its “deterrent power”. What, on July 12, made Hizbullah’s seizure of two soldiers so unbearable was not that it was a “terrorist” act; it was that – allowed to pass without an appropriate response – it would have constituted a grievous blow to that “deterrent power”. But with the extraordinary shortcomings of that response it has not only failed to repair its deterrent power, it has undermined it as never before.

Hizbullah achieved this in various ways. On the strictly military level, a small band of irregulars kept at bay one of the world’s most powerful armies for over a month, and inflicted remarkable losses on it; the manner in which it did this – a combination of professional skills, ingenuity, intrepidity, meticulous preparation, masterful use of anti-tank missiles, brilliant organisation, labyrinthine underground defences – is only now fully coming to light. This was only possible because Hizbullah represented something else: the first non-state actor to single-handedly take on Israel in a full-scale war of this kind. Only such an actor could have secured the freedom of action to prepare for and conduct such a war. Yet it was Israel itself, through its earlier attempts to change its strategic environment by force, that did so much to create Hizbullah, just as, in Palestine, it did so much to create Hamas.

It is not just Hizbullah’s performance in itself that has changed the balance of power at Israel’s expense; it is the example it sets for the whole region. In his way Hassan Nasrallah is now an even more inspiring Arab hero than Nasser was; Hizbullah’s achievement has had an electrifying impact on the Arab and Muslim masses that largely transcends the otherwise growing, region-wide Sunni-Shia divide; it will contribute to their further radicalisation and, if that is not appeased by the Arab regimes, to upheavals in the whole existing order. “Public opinion says to the regimes, ‘If they are getting more on the battlefield than you are at the negotiating table, and you have so many more means at your disposal, then what the hell are you doing?’ ” says Mouin Rabbani of the International Crisis Group.

Hizbullah has no intention of disarming, and it is improbable that anyone else can get it to do so. Never before, therefore, has Israel ended a war so persuaded that, sooner or later, it will only generate another. The only way to prevent that is to get Israel and the US to realise that those “root causes” out of which it grew lie on their side too. Israel may not have caused “global terror” and Islamic extremism, but with its own violence, especially that against civilians, it greatly inflames it. And Israel resorts to violence, at bottom, because it cannot achieve peace; and it cannot achieve that because the only peace it has ever offered falls so far short of what Arabs and Palestinians could ever accept. This is the conclusion a few Israelis, Europeans and even leading Americans are drawing. But there is no sign of the Israeli establishment or President Bush doing so. They should bear in mind, says Israeli commentator Nissim Kalderon, that “the difficult war imposed upon us obliges us to take greater risks for peace after the war. Because the risks of the coming missile war with the fundamentalists could be greater. Much greater.”

(David Hirst reported from the Middle East for The Guardian from 1963 to 2001 dhirst@beirut.com)

The awkward fact for Israel is that Hizbullah, in its long war against Israel, never made a policy of targeting civilians, except in retaliation for Israel’s targeting of Lebanese civilians. This, moreover, is a recent development. Throughout the 17 years of its fight against the Israeli occupation of Lebanon, Hizbullah killed only 20 Israeli civilians as opposed to the thousands of Lebanese killed by Israel. Even in the current war the ratio of Israeli military to civilian deaths has not fallen below 60 per cent, whereas the number of Hizbullah fighters who have died in battle is less than 10 per cent of the thousand Lebanese dead. This is not to mention the million Lebanese who have been driven from their homes and who will find no villages to which to return following Israel’s orgy of destruction.

Self-fulfilling prophecy

Azmi Bishara 17/8/06

Peoples of the world are divided into those whose governments possess fighter planes and those whose governments do not possess them. In like manner, the victims of bombs are divided into individual human beings and statistical estimates based on scattered body parts amidst the rubble, the former being the victims of terrorism the latter of collateral damage.

[It is symptomatic of Western racism that Israel and its sympathisers are blind to what it is ordinary Arabs find admirable in Hizbullah]

Journalist: How will the deaths of Israeli soldiers today affect your plans?

Israeli Army Spokesman: You saw that massacre of 12 Israelis .. it will …

Journalist: Massacre you said? But those were soldiers and this is war.

Spokesman: No, it was a massacre because the people who fired the missiles weren’t targeting soldiers. They were targeting Israeli civilians but killed the soldiers by accident.

Journalist: But you also committed massacres in Qana and elsewhere.

Spokesman: No, there was no massacre in Qana. Hizbullah fighters were the targets of the bombardment but civilians were hit by accident.

This nightmarish gibberish, which would make any journalist quit his job, a spectator smash his TV screen and a dialogue participant abandon his faith in dialogue, is not from Alice in Wonderland. It is an excerpt taken verbatim from an interview on an Arab satellite station with a young spokesman for the Israeli Defence Forces.

Now, when Israeli soldiers die it’s a massacre, whereas the wiping out of entire families in the course of the aerial bombardment of their homes and villages doesn’t rate the term. That’s not a massacre but an “accident” or, in the euphemistic jargon of the science of the war against terrorism, collateral damage.

Much has been written about this term, which explains so little but hides so much — which, after all, is the function of much political jargon: to keep people from understanding what is really going on. “Collateral damage” is used to refer to the civilian casualties in the war against terrorism, or the war against those who target civilians.

Peoples of the world are divided into those whose governments possess fighter planes and those whose governments do not possess them. In like manner, the victims of bombs are divided into individual human beings and statistical estimates based on scattered body parts amidst the rubble, the former being the victims of terrorism the latter of collateral damage.

The victims of the war against terrorism are indistinct. They stir a fleeting image of pain, perhaps, as felt by themselves or their loved ones, but ultimately they are reduced to a regretful side effect, the responsibility for which is attributed to their political leaders, or their national or ethnic affiliation, their erroneous ideological beliefs or plain stubbornness. They will soon fade into obscurity. After rescue workers pull the mangled bodies from under the rubble several days after a bombing raid, renewed bombardment, the press of the latest news flashes and another harvest of victims will have pushed them from the headlines.

The interview cited above is one scene in this saga of the absurd. Another is the sight of fleeing southern Lebanese who have sought refuge in Palestinian refugee camps in their country. Then there is Israel, acting as though it is the victim, chomping at the bit to avenge itself against Hizbullah, the criminal attacker. There is the military circus that pretends it is a parliament, a tribe that calls itself democratic whooping in a war dance before TV cameras and marching to martial music in the studios of a purportedly democratic media.

The majority of victims in this war of terror belong to ethnic groups, or “cultures” as they are referred to now, that occupy the lowest rungs of the global cultural ladder. They belong to the collateral damage “culture”, as opposed to the victims of terrorism “culture”.

Recently the cultures that have been reduced to this inferior status have attempted to defend themselves by brandishing the term “state terrorism”. One would think this concept would be an effective weapon to counter the socalled war on terror and its concomitant collateral damage. Unfortunately the balances of power are so heavily tipped against it that it ended up being trampled on, ridiculed or, at best, turned into a metaphor for cultural clash. The leaders of terrorist states don’t have to live in hiding. They aren’t pursued by fighter planes. They can be heard live on TV instead of through prerecorded videos. Human rights activists and clergymen are not embarrassed to meet them. They can ensure the word “terrorism” remains the weapon of their culture, the culture of the strong.

The awkward fact for Israel is that Hizbullah, in its long war against Israel, never made a policy of targeting civilians, except in retaliation for Israel’s targeting of Lebanese civilians. This, moreover, is a recent development. Throughout the 17 years of its fight against the Israeli occupation of Lebanon, Hizbullah killed only 20 Israeli civilians as opposed to the thousands of Lebanese killed by Israel. Even in the current war the ratio of Israeli military to civilian deaths has not fallen below 60 per cent, whereas the number of Hizbullah fighters who have died in battle is less than 10 per cent of the thousand Lebanese dead. This is not to mention the million Lebanese who have been driven from their homes and who will find no villages to which to return following Israel’s orgy of destruction.

This “collateral” destruction is deliberate and calculated. It is an extension of the state terrorism upon which Israel was built. Israel would not exist today had it not been for its systematic massacres of the Palestinian population in 1948. And if these massacres can be swept into some remote corner of history, written off as outbursts of Israel’s infancy and later repressed in the collective memory, this cannot apply to later massacres. By the early 1950s killing civilians had evolved into a conscious military creed, as epitomised by Unit 101, founded and commanded by Sharon with the aim of carrying out retaliatory actions against civilians in areas where fedayeen operations had taken place.

This targeting civilians has been transmitted from generation to generation in the Israeli army.

Observers who have heard Israeli politicians and military officials away from the microphones of press conferences will have been subjected to daily rants about the need to flatten every Lebanese village that a missile comes from, to destroy electricity generators and other infrastructure and bomb the country back to the dark ages. These statements, and others, reflect a belief that the Arabs do not have to be treated according to the rules that apply to other peoples and nations.

Israeli spokespersons are steadfastly driving home the idea of two distinct and incompatible cultures, two civilisations, two worlds. If the world is divided into cultures and these cultures are divided into friend of foe, which is to say that the world is embroiled in an enormous culture clash, then the notion of “double standards” loses all moral opprobrium, becoming the natural order of things. In an article appearing in Yediot Aharanot of 7 August Rabin’s former PR advisor, the rabidly racist Eitan Haber, turned the clash of civilisations from a theoretical concept, a made-in-the-US paradigm for understanding the world, into a real and concrete war. Then, with customary pomposity he suggested that the current conflict between Israel and Hizbullah was that very war: “We are at war,” he writes. “It is not an ‘operation’ or a ‘broad manoeuvre.’ It is war… Failure could bring ghosts out of the closet — the entire fundamentalist Islamic world is baring its teeth at the Western world and moderate Arab countries.”

The French-US sponsored UN Security Council resolution seems geared to transform this imaginary culture conflict into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Regardless of its underlying political position, as a literary text it is Israel’s narrative and the narrator is Israel. Israel, it tells us, is threatened by Hizbullah rockets. If Israel is to halt its bombardment Hizbullah must stop firing missiles into Israel first. Everyone knows that Israel regards the mere existence of missiles that could threaten its cities, even if only for deterrent purposes, as an act of aggression that must be answered. It is Israel’s right to threaten Lebanon, not Lebanon’s right to threaten Israel. As for the total destruction of half of Lebanon and the partial destruction of the other half, well that’s a “matter of opinion”.

The document goes on to grant that the conflict began with the capture of the two Israeli soldiers and that Israel had the right to declare this a causus belli. The first step to ending the war is for Hizbullah to release the soldiers unconditionally. Thus, with feigned naïveté, the resolution sets an official stamp on Israel’s pretext for going to war and for killing thousands and displacing a million in order to free two Israeli soldiers. Clearly, one of the resolution’s collateral purposes is to consecrate the superiority of one culture over another. The draft resolution concludes with a call for the disarming of Hizbullah, Israel’s original demand. From beginning to end, in its premises and aims, the language and substance is Israeli. The representatives of the nations who drafted it proceeded entirely from the Israeli perspective. “Cultural” communality has determined that Israel must be compensated for its military failures and that the Lebanese resistance must be prevented from translating its gains on the ground into political gains.

We should pause for a moment and consider what, exactly, the Arab people believe Hizbullah has accomplished and why they might be angered to see Israel’s allies on the Security Council and elsewhere obstruct the translation of these accomplishments into political gains.

The Arab people admire Hizbullah for reasons completely different to the ones people in the West and Israel suspect. The Arab public is drawn to Hizbullah precisely because it stands apart from Arab regimes and, simultaneously, from organisations like Al-Qaeda. Hizbullah is not corrupt and impotent like Arab regimes, and it does not cowardly target civilians like terrorist organisations. Rather, it has waged a valiant fight directly against the Israeli army, rejecting the disregard of Arab regimes for their own citizens when Israel attacks or kidnaps them. Hizbullah insists on avenging its dead and demanding the release of Lebanese prisoners in Israel. Hizbullah regards the blood of Lebanese civilians as of no less worth than that of Israeli civilians, and in taking this stance it has revived a sense of Arab dignity not only with respect to Israel but with respect to their own governments.

The Arabs admire Hizbullah not as an Iranian tool but because it is made up of Arab Muslim fighters who are rebuilding people’s confidence in their identity. If these Arabs can take on Israel so can others, once they are free of the fetters of underdevelopment and armed with resolve. The Arabs admire Hizbullah for the same qualities that Americans or Europeans would admire a political party that led them in a struggle against a foreign enemy: valour, courage, persistence, organisational skill, modesty in words, strength in action, a strong grassroots base, a desire to help the needy and other manifestations of a social conscience. They admire Hizbullah because it avoids hollow sloganeering, it is not corrupt and its electoral victories are not the result of nepotism, favoritism or bribes.

Israeli and Western politicians, and those Arabs who share their fear of Hizbullah, believed that the key to resolving their concerns lay in sectarian differences. They placed their bets on the Shia-Sunni divide, only to be surprised at how they had misjudged things. Hizbullah’s religious affiliation is both a strength and a weakness, but it certainly has not stood in the way of the party’s popularity in the Arab world.

Yet the popularity of Hizbullah remains a mystery to Western politicians, a manifestation of the irrational oriental mindset, of a dark and unfathomable culture that subscribes to martyrdom. They will continue to insist upon this as they collude to obstruct Hizbullah’s right to capitalise on its gains through its own persistence and by working together with others in its own society. They will insist and insist until the culture clash prophecy fulfills itself, which is to say until Arabs who admire the Hizbullah model realise that the West is hostile to it because it represents a “different” culture and as a consequence grow increasingly hostile to the West.

Hizbullah has not made it easy for those Arab intellectuals who do not like to distinguish between the culprits and the victims, who appeal to Beirut while ignoring the refugees in that city’s parks and schools, who urge both sides to exercise restraint in spite of the evidence at Bint Jbeil, Al-Duwair, Mrouhin, Eita Al-Sha’b, Ansar, Tyre, Shiyah and the Bakaa. Hizbullah hasn’t made it easy for those who make their living from dialogue with the West, who are ready to squander whatever autonomous sources of strength they have left in exchange for US approval of their desire to coexist with Israel and their readiness to pay whatever price is exacted for recognising it.

Hizbullah isn’t looking for peace with Israel. Nor is it interested in receiving brownie points for being “enlightened” or “moderate”. It sees its own enlightenment, as Israel sees hers, in its rationalisation and organisational strength. Ideologically, morally and in its origins, Hizbullah is founded within the Palestinian historical narrative, related by Palestinian refugees to the farmers and poets of Lebanon ever since catastrophe brought the poor of the Lebanese south and Palestinian refugees together in the same saga. Hizbullah will not lend itself as fodder to the “dialogue and coexistence industry”. It is too deep for that. It is too busy writing a hands-on theology for the wretched of the Arab earth. This leaves very little opening for opportunist intellectuals to sell Hizbullah to the West. Hizbullah is not concerned with “the recognition of Israel” and, unlike the PLO and others, it refuses to engage in a discourse that involves using basic principles as bargaining chips. Hizbullah thrives on fighting as an equal, not on being compensated for its absence in the field by a false equality around the negotiating table. Hizbullah is not in the business of selling souvenir pictures of Nasrallah or in the business of courting the admiration of others. Hizbullah simply doesn’t act like racists think a Muslim or Arab should act. The Muslim or Arab, according to the common racist assumption, will either sell out his principles and identity, toe the moderate line, live in peace as an inferior and ingratiate himself to his superiors or he will recoil into a nihilistic hatred and rejection of the other and of the West, thereby confirming his backwardness and the racist assumptions.

From City to Town to Village, Israeli `Summer Rains` Continue to fall on Gaza

Rami Almeghari IMEMC News 13.8.06

In the furthest reaches of eastern Rafah City, in the southernmost part of Gaza Strip, the village of Shouka , population 14,000, is located. Reaching the village at night time is difficult for strangers, as taxi drivers decline to take people there. It was almost night time, when the driver took me to the nearest place, the Salah Eldin Road, eastern Rafah. I got out of his taxi, looking for another driver: Awni, a local Shouka resident and driver, who is aware of every single corner in Shouka, and we began our drive through dusty roads and trees.

Torn water pipes of green houses, scattered bricks and cut trees were lying everywhere en route to the Village`s mayor, Mansour Braika. But we managed to reach the mayor`s house, and asked him about the Israeli occupation army invasion of Shouka that lasted over a month, until the army finally pulled out of Shouka August 2. `Silence, mixed with battered farms and destroyed houses, have been the main features of our small village since the Israeli forces left 10 days ago`.

Mayor Mansour pointed out that `For more than 40 days, the Shouka rural area has been under Israeli attack, as the Israeli tanks have been firing, by day and night, on the people`s houses and farms.” `The damages are immense; 129 green houses have been destroyed, 58 houses were torn down, while many of our village`s inhabitants have been evacuated to safe shelters at local UNRWA (United Nations Refugee and Works Agency)`s schools. The water networks in the village have been totally destroyed. Shouka is a traumatized village`, Mayor Mansour confirmed.

The Mayor refuted Israeli allegations that the village is used for launching home-made rockets on Israeli

territories: `This is a rural area, where families are bound by tribal connections; no strangers can enter at night time, therefore, we are refuting the Israeli side`s allegations that the area is used for launching rockets. The farmers here are protecting their livelihoods. We don`t have any strangers in the village — resistance forces, thieves, or anyone.`.

26 year-old local farmer Toufic Albraikat, described the destruction he has suffered: `2000 square meters of green houses plus 4000 square meters of electronically-irrigated garlic crops plus 9 sheep and 2000 bricks as well as a barbed-wire fence around my land, all have been destroyed by the Israeli tanks `.

We drove back from the village on our way to the main local Rafah hospital of Abu Yousef Alnajjar, where Dr. Ali Mousa, the hospital`s director was waiting to talk of the human losses the Shouka village has suffered in the latest Israeli attack. `The last invasion of Shouka by the Israeli military forces resulted in a total of 17 dead, 50 injured. Around 25 of the dead and injured are children under the age of 15. We found that in this attack that the Israeli forces used a new weapon, as most or even all of the dead received by the hospital had been shot by missiles and tank bombs. The bodies of the victims had been torn apart, covered with burns. Fifteen of the wounded are in critical condition, having each had at least one limb amputated`

`We have never seen these types of injuries before in the past six years of open conflict. Here we are unable to diagnose the nature of these injuries due to the severe lack of specialized medical centers, but we are sure that this is an illegal weapon. Therefore, we call on all international institutions and the United Nations to examine this type of weapon, which is being used for the first time in Palestine`.

In Gaza City, the next day, Silvia Pevetti, of the Gaza-based Office of World Health Organization, said that her organization is gathering information on the issue of banned weaponry, after having received an official request from the Palestinian government, but has not issued a report as of yet.

Graciela Lopez, Acting Head of Gaza Sub-delegation of the International Committee of the Red Cross said: `In general, we are here to remind the warring parties of their obligations under International Humanitarian Law to respect the civilian populations at all times and to make all possible distinctions between persons directly involved in the hostilities and the civilian population.’

Asked about possible Israeli use of illegal weapons against the Palestinian population in Gaza, Lopez maintained: `We are in contact with hospitals and with the Palestinian Red Crescent Societies, working in the medical field, and it is our concern to follow up on these allegations of the use of a new type of weapons. At this moment, we cannot confirm the use of any particular type of new weapon. We are following the situation and take these allegations seriously`.

According to the latest Palestinian Health Ministry reports, since the June 26 military attack codenamed `Summer Rains` has begun, the Israeli occupation army has killed 203 Palestinians, including 58 children and 25 women, and wounded 783 others, including 281 children, and 86 women. 72 of the injured have had limbs amputated.

There is a huge gap between us (Jews) and our enemies, not just in ability but in morality, culture, sanctity of life, and conscience. They are our neighbours here, but it seems as if at a distance of a few hundred metres away, there are people who do not belong to our continent, to our world, but actually belong to a different galaxy.